It's a distortion pedal that was built by our friend Rob Skinner here in Seattle -- it was modeled after the Zvex Fuzz Factory (I think Rob calls his pedal the Fuzz Face). Anyway, he let me borrow a prototype model, which is a big unmarked silver box with two switches and four knobs. It makes the craziest, out of control distortion and squealing feedback, which quickly made me a pariah with the rest of the band anytime I even made a motion toward it. I discovered that if you plug in an instrument cable into the input, but *don't* plug in an instrument into the cable, the box itself becomes a tone generator. This is how I got all those squealing "Defender" (remember the original Defender video game? anyone?) sounds in the second verse of the "Carjack Fever."